There's a big dance Friday night at St Vitus Hall

So, how do you feel about premarital splooting?

Experts are torn.  While many "enlightened" teachers, clergy, parents, and counselors find a little splooting-curiosity to be a perfectly normal part of adolescence, just about the same as learning salacious dances, and flirting with strangers who just happen to be in police custody, more and more authorities are pointing to the rise in Sydenham chorea, also known as St. Vitus dance, and calling it the unwanted fruit of the sploot tree.

Many schools and penal institutions are keeping a closer eye on the 13-17-year-olds who seem to be the most likely to be drawn to seeing what's behind the homeroom buzz about splooting, hoping to stem splootomania before it rips the very fabric of the nation, which is only being held together by some very loosely basted stitches and some surgical staples.

Perhaps it's time now, before school starts back up, to talk to YOUR child, to warn them of the dangers of indiscriminate splooting. Remind them that what seems so innocent beneath the football bleachers on a moonlit night can turn deadly serious when that "All-American" boy suddenly becomes "All hands."

All right, I was only joking, because things get so dumb, it's all I can do. It turns out that some of us, not satisfied with looking into the lives of other humans, are now sitting around fretting about squirrels do in hot weather, which is splooting.

For real. Splooting.

When it gets unholy hot, as it did this summer, you will see squirrels sprawled out on the bellies, propped on their tiny elbows, hugging the earth for all it's worth.

And humans, apparently driven somewhat off their beams by this sight, are posting 40,000+ Instagram images of splooting squirrels, dogs and even cats in the prone position. But we shouldn't worry about it: turns out, this activity is quite healthy for animals, actually, and it's one of the ways they have of cooling down in extreme heat (the other is getting a part-time job in the frozen food aisle at SavSumMor.)

The bellies of many mammals are less furry than the rest of them, making the frontal region a handy way to get some heat burned off, as it were. And we get that solid from to Dan Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The New York City Parks Department actually found it necessary to go on Twitter to let anxious New Yorkers know it was time to go back to worrying about the Yankees and leave the animals to do what comes naturally. "If you see a squirrel lying down like this, don't worry it's just fine. On hot days, squirrels keep cool by splooting," tweeted the department.

What WILL we worry about next?